Paula Lupkin is a cultural and architectural historian with a special interest in the growth and development of American cities. She teaches in the American Culture Studies program at Washington University in St. Louis. Manhood Factories (Minnesota, 2010), featured in her Rorotoko interview, was supported with grants from the University of Pennsylvania, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. This spring she will be a Quadrant Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, working on a next book project about the connections between German beer and the American built environment.
Although it engages directly with the fields of architectural history, gender studies, and urban history this book is really for anyone who has ever gone swimming, or played a game of pick-up basketball, or worked out at a YMCA.It is also for anyone who has walked on by the local YMCA without taking much notice of the building. In other words, it is really for everyone: a call for understanding the role of architecture in shaping our everyday lives.My goal in writing Manhood Factories was to draw attention to the meaning and importance of urban buildings we all take for granted. Manhood Factories invites people to pay attention to seemingly unremarkable structures, like the YMCA. The unassuming facades of these buildings masked the organization’s program to mold a modern, corporate, yet moral urban society through recreation and leisure.
Paula Lupkin Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture University of Minnesota Press 312 pages, 10 3/4 x 8 1/2 inches ISBN 978 0816648351ISBN 978 0816648344
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